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Well, the question has been basically answered on this thread, but I will add just a little bit more, as a memory of the thing. As the scandal started to really unfold, after almost a year, the hearings began to be covered on TV. At first, the Watergate hearings were only on PBS, which a lot of people don't remember; only later, as it started to expand and people realized there was a serious crime here, and that it led to Nixon, was it covered by the commercial networks. Also, Walter Cronkite at CBS was on the story as early as Woodward and Bernstein. This was when it really exploded, became a National obsession, etc.
For a long time, the problem was trying to figure if the "Plumbers" and the "Cubans"--basically Republican dirty-tricks committee (headed by Patrick Buchanan) code words for the burglars--were actually connected with the Republicans and the Committee to Re-Elect the President, (of course, they were), and what they had stolen at Democratic Party Headquarters, etc. During the hearings, Gen. Alexander Butterfield revealed that Nixon had a secret taping system in the Oval Office and recorded everything. As soon as that was revealed, it became the focus of the search. Nixon was ordered to hand over the tapes, did not, and claimed "executive privilege." There was a Court order and threat of obstruction of justice charges, and Nixon still did not, but with now drastically falling poll numbers, Nixon offered to release edited transcripts of what was supposedly on the tapes, claiming that the edits were only of swear words, etc.--of course, this was unacceptable, and the tension rose. The phrase for all these edits, very famous then, became "expletive deleted." Other phrases famous at the time, because of the Watergate hearings, were "unindicted co-conspirator," "specificity," etc.
The transcripts were released, finally by the White House, under threat of prosecution, but they were so heavily censored that they answered nothing and only made investigators madder. The tapes themselves were ordered released, and months later, when they finally were, there was a very famous 18-minute (I think it was) gap on one of them, a very long, suspicious delete, that was comically "explained" (along with a famous picture of Nixon's secretary Rose Mary Woods) as a "mistake" on her part, as she supposedly erased it by reaching with one arm, and her opposite foot pushed the button, etc.--a very famous, obviously lying, "explanation" of the deletion. Still, the tapes were damning, and proved Nixon was in on it, planning, right from the beginning.
Nixon was sacrificing people all over the place just to avoid cooperating with the Special Prosecutor--John Dean, Zeigler, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, etc., all fired--but still the investigation went on. Finally, Nixon was going to put an end to it and crush the whole thing by firing the Special Prosecutor. Eliot Richardson refused to do it, and resigned. Ruckelshaus resigned. It was a legal investigation of a crime, and the Republican Party was not completely made up of criminals then, as it is now. Then, on that Saturday night, (I suppose to try to not be noticed by the news, by being on a weekend evening--but of course, as soon as it happened, they broke into the TV schedule and the coverage was all about this crisis; live), that bastard Bork illegally fired the Prosecutor. Of course, then there was another Special Prosecutor to replace Cox, Leon Jaworski I think it was, who was just as good, and honest, as Cox had been. It changed nothing.
Nixon was a vicious bastard who had been slandering and destroying good people for career advancement all the way back to the days of Helen Gahagan Douglass and the House Un-American Activities Committee's slander against Alger Hiss--my parents hated Nixon for the vicious, lying smear against Helen Gahagan Douglass, which worked ("Pinko," etc.), and for all the other lies and crimes. One of their biggest crimes of that year 1972 was the systematic destruction, by lies, spies, planted hecklers, etc., of the Presidential campaign of one of the finest people ever to serve in Congress, who would have been a great President, and who was the strongest Democratic candidate, the late, great Sen. Edmund Muskie. What a terrible loss that alone was for the country. Republicans only get worse over time. Before, there were criminals like Nixon, McCarthy, etc., and the rest actually fought them too. Now, they are all Nixon, and there is no one on their side to stand up for the truth.
(By the way, texpatriot2004, thank you for your wonderful comments on the DU (Political) Poetry Thread. Sometimes you post these things you write, and you don't know if anybody is reading them, so it was really great--I was actually just exhilarated--to read your response on that thread. I also posted two other poems of mine, not political, on threads in the Writing forum, which I think they have now moved to the DU Groups section, so I can't post there anymore. One was on "So, What Do You Write?" and the other was a narrative on, I think it was called, "Untitled.")
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